Awakener

by J. C. Staudt

  He turned north at the next cross street and passed an open-air market where merchants were selling crops imported from the Eastgap via the Dathiri River trade routes. The familiar scents of corn, wheat, potatoes, and rice made him think of home, and of the tall golden fields ripe with harvest. He would miss them this year, but he reveled in the thought of the years to come.

  At the market’s edge, he came to a quiet side street. He wasn’t sure this was the way he’d intended to go, but cutting through might prove quicker than looking for a way around. As he started up the cobbled slope, a narrow alley opened to his right. He glanced over to see two figures conversing in the shadows, one tall and thin, the other short and squat. The shorter figure made a gesture, holding his hand out flat as if to indicate the height of something. “The other’s about this tall,” Maaltred heard him say. “She’s got five years, at least.”

  Ignore it, he told himself. Ignore it and move on. He could be talking about anyone. You mustn’t get wrapped up in this, whatever it is. Yet somehow, his feet refused to take him any further. He halted and stared blankly at the two figures, whose backs were partly turned. They hadn’t yet noticed him.

  “When can I see them?” asked the taller one. It was a woman’s voice.

  This was Maaltred’s moment to leave it all behind. Norne had promised to report him dead; he imagined the king shrugging his shoulders and accepting the loss without bother. He could return to Juna and Liselle and forget Olyvard, forget the spheres, forget Eril and the Ulther girls and their traitorous father. What are the chances I’ve stumbled upon them after three days of fruitless searching? he wondered.

  “Hey,” called the shorter one, whom Maaltred might’ve guessed was of dwarvenkind. “You there.”

  Maaltred looked around, saw he was the only one nearby, and stammered, “Eh—yes?”

  “Be on your way.” The dwarf flicked a hand as if to brush off a pest.

  Maaltred opened his mouth to speak. Then he ran.

  He knew it wasn’t the wisest response, yet when his legs finally started listening to him it was all they could do. He scrambled up the sloping street, his pack bobbing behind him, and ducked into the next alley. After catching his breath, he poked his head out and found with relief that there was no one following him.

  The woman emerged from the other alley and headed for the open-air market through which Maaltred had come. The dwarf turned the other way and started up the cobbled slope toward him. Maaltred pressed himself against the alley wall and closed his eyes like a shy child, as if it might prevent the dwarf from seeing him. He waited, heart pounding, while the dwarf’s plodding footsteps moved past. There was a slight limp in his gait, an off-beat rhythm Maaltred might’ve missed had he not listened closely.

  Forget about them, Maaltred told himself as he took to the street and hurried off to find the next main avenue. Forget what you heard. Clearly it couldn’t have been the Ulther girls they were talking about; it would be too great a coincidence. Yet the dwarf’s words echoed through him with every step. She’s got five years, at least. The other one’s about this tall. She’s got five years. Five years, at least.

  “You’re going home,” Maaltred said aloud, half to convince himself. “You are leaving Forandran through its north gate and going home to Juna and Liselle.”

  “Who are you talking to?” asked a young woman in a simple roughspun dress carrying a basket of rushes. She wore a circlet of wildflowers in her hair, and her eyes were as green as summer grass.

  “Myself,” Maaltred replied absently.

  She smiled. “No one holds a conversation better, I always say.”

  “Except when the disagreement starts. Sometimes it’s hardest to win a debate when you’re the one arguing back.”

  “Oh, it’s always hardest,” she said, sweeping a lock of unwashed blonde hair behind her ear. “No one knows how to exploit your weaknesses better than you do.”

  “And what am I to do if my weaknesses are outweighing my good sense?”

  “Perhaps your good sense isn’t as good as you think it is. Farewell.” She gave him a shallow curtsy and went on her way.

  Maaltred held up a finger to stop her, but she was gone. “Bother,” he muttered.

  He’d never followed anyone before. Except maybe Juna once or twice, when he happened upon her walking home from the river with her washing and took the chance to sneak up and surprise her. Following a dwarf he didn’t know down the streets of an unfamiliar city in broad daylight was something altogether different. The dwarf had a strange way of moving, a lazy amble with little hurry in it, as though he felt more overweight than he was.

  Maaltred kept his distance, panicking each time he lost sight of the dwarf in the crowds or around a corner. After several city blocks and enough twists and turns to befuddle Maaltred’s sense of direction entirely, the dwarf entered a cathedral built all of dark stone with twin gabled bell towers dominated by an enormous rose window. Despite his lack of a plan, Maaltred followed.

  The cathedral’s interior looked as though it hadn’t been used in years. Splintered pews lay strewn across the sanctuary beneath the ceiling’s cracked arches and a mural whose paint was chipping so badly Maaltred couldn’t distinguish the image. He wondered whether he should’ve gone back to the Temple of Phyraxis to alert Vicar Norne and Sister Wolla before coming inside, but it was too late for that. He followed the dwarf through the darkened sanctuary, careful not to make a sound in the enormous stone room.

  When the dwarf passed through a door beside the altar, Maaltred quickened his pace to catch him up. He waited a few seconds before opening the door and peering into the dark hallway beyond. The glow of a moving torch faded down a stairwell to the right. Maaltred could hear creaking footsteps, and crept to the stairs just as the torchlight disappeared around a bend at the bottom.

  This is the most foolish thing you’ve ever done, he told himself as he started down. He took his time, but the wooden steps were old and thin, and they creaked with every footfall. He had to pause several times, fearing the dwarf might hear him and double back.

  At the bottom he found himself in a round chamber with walls banded in cracked stone half-pillars. Sunken into the floor at the center lay a circular pool surrounded by six waist-high stone plinths. Dim fires floated atop the plinths, each a different color—red, purple, green, orange, white, and blue.

  The chamber carried a damp smell, and Maaltred could hear the slow wet drip of leaky stones nearby. He approached the pool and stared down at his reflection in its murky depths, where a dark thick liquid rippled with the color of the rainbow fires. The floor surrounding the pool was inscribed with a circle of runes the like of which Maaltred had never seen before. He shivered with a sudden cold, yet his curiosity drew him on.

  A cry from outside the chamber startled him. He scanned the walls and noticed a stone door blended into a curved section between two half-pillars. Continuing round the room, he spotted a second door; then a third, and a fourth. There were six doors including the one he’d entered by, each aligned with one of the burning plinths.

  With no inkling of which door the dwarf had passed through, Maaltred could only follow the sound he’d heard. The door diagonally forward to his left was aligned with the green plinth. It reminded him of the bright green fires burning in the forge beneath Castle Maergath. He remembered how the wild-song’s power had comforted him in those days; how he’d anticipated the suppression of the mage-song and the admiration of the king.

  Now he could only look back in regret. He’d wasted three years away from his family in hopes of contributing something of importance to the kingdom, yet here he was, worse off than when he started. And instead of making a clean break when given the chance, his conscience had driven him to follow a stranger into the basement of an abandoned cathedral. It isn’t too late to turn back, he told himself.

  It was, though. Ryssa and Vyleigh might be the children of a traitor, but Maaltred wasn’t so cruel as to believe they deserve
d the same fate as their father. He might’ve believed it before, but not anymore.

  He put his ear to the smooth curved door and listened. He heard nothing aside from the sounds of dripping water. Since there was no doorknob, handle, or other apparent means of release, he felt around the edges for a trigger or pressure plate. Nothing.

  He returned to the pool and looked at the fires again; in particular, the green flame burning on the nearest plinth. He reached out to feel its warmth, but there was none. It was limpid and ghost-like, emitting neither heat nor cold.

  He flattened his palm and swept it through the flame.

  A draft of cold air prickled the hair on his neck and made the flames flicker on their plinths. He turned to find the stone door standing open. A long straight corridor stretched into darkness, sections of its walls caved into heaps of crumbled stone. A sense of foreboding filled him as he stared into that blackest of tunnels with the flame silhouetting him like a green behemoth against the chamber wall.

  You’re a clever one, Maaltred Furiel. You’ve discovered a door into darkness for which you’ve brought no light. Moving ahead no longer struck him as the obvious course. Surely it would be better to alert Norne and Wolla to what he’d found.

  As he stood deliberating with himself, the curved door slid to a close on bearings as silent as a whisper. He swept his hand through the flame again, and the door slid open. After a few seconds, it closed.

  In or out? He asked himself. In or out? The question bolted through his mind half a hundred times. Once you step through that doorway, and the stone closes behind you, there’s no coming back.

  Perhaps your good sense isn’t as good as you think it is, said the young blonde woman carrying the basket of rushes. Maaltred cursed under his breath as he slid his hand through the green flame once more. He needed to know what was down that tunnel. He needed to know whether he was wasting his time, or if he’d stumbled onto something.

  Next he knew he was blundering down the dark corridor, stubbing his toes and tripping over every stray stone along the way. There was a muddy, burnt smell coming from further on, past where the ghastly green light faded to shadow. The closing door erased the light from right to left, leaving him in total darkness.

  Something skittered across the floor in front of him. A spiderweb caught his forehead and clung to it, too high up for a dwarf—or two young girls—to have run into. This was a wonderful idea. You haven’t the slightest suggestion of where you’re going or what you’ll do when you get there. Just a fool’s hope that everything will work out for the best. Someone else’s best, no doubt.

  After bumping his shins on half a dozen piles of rubble, Maaltred slowed his pace. He was worried about the amount of noise he was making, unsure whether the sounds of his movement were carrying ahead to wherever the dwarf had ended up. The corridor took a slight right turn, at which juncture Maaltred caught sight of a distant door outlined in faint orange light.

  At tunnel’s end he put an ear to the rough wooden door for a listen. Hearing no sound from within, he grasped the iron ring and gave it a tug. The door scraped open, and he stepped out onto a narrow balcony girding the upper floor of an immense two-story chamber. He crept to the stone balustrade to look over the side.

  Torches burned in sconces on the stone columns supporting the balcony. Alcoves dimpled the walls between each pair of columns, housing a series of closed stone sarcophagi. Water trickled from a gouge in the wall to form a shallow stream which cascaded down the angled steps dividing the room. Other doors and entryways led off both levels, but the dwarf was nowhere in sight.

  A door at the adjacent corner of the balcony opened onto a downward staircase leading to the lower level. Maaltred could feel the air growing colder as he descended. He passed through the stone archway at the bottom and found an identical row of alcoves containing stone sarcophagi against the near wall. Upon the raised platform, past where the shallow steps split the room, lay another rune circle like the one he’d seen in the antechamber. Within the circle stood an altar of stone, partially collapsed and long unused.

  Maaltred heard footsteps approaching through one of the stone archways and dove behind the altar to hide. He peeked out to see the dwarf enter the room behind two children. To his dismay, the children were not Ryssa and Vyleigh, but a young boy with elven features and a younger littlefolk girl in a dress of muted blue linen. The dwarf pointed them toward the staircase, and the trio ascended to the balcony.

  Maaltred froze as they passed overhead. Should any of them look down over the balustrade, he would almost certainly be seen. He breathed a sigh of relief when the dwarf ushered the children through a door at the balcony’s far end.

  Taking a torch from the nearest sconce, Maaltred crossed the room and passed beneath the archway through which the dwarf had entered with the two children. The corridor beyond was in far better condition than the last. At its end, a short staircase brought him down into an open cavern where a raging river flowed beneath a natural stone bridge.

  Across the bridge, a pair of wall-mounted torches flanked a door in the stone wall. Maaltred was halfway across when a blast of cold wind howled through the cavern, pushing him to within a few spans of the edge. He caught his balance and risked a look down at the fast-moving river, where whitecaps skimmed sharp rocks beneath the surface. This was likely an offshoot of the Dathiri River flowing toward the Sparleaf. No doubt the wind and water in this cavern were under the sphere’s influence as much as any weather aboveground.

  The door across the bridge was locked. It was then Maaltred knew he’d made a mistake. He might be trapped now, and who knew when the dwarf would return or how many accomplices he had. Surely Eril and the Ulther girls couldn’t be down here. But as Maaltred turned to retreat across the bridge, he heard the door swing open behind him.

  “Help you?” asked a littlefolk woman with a round nose and pink cheeks. Her curly hair was drawn into a tight bun, and she wore a stained apron over a simple dress of cotton and lace.

  Maaltred didn’t know what to say. He said nothing at all for a moment, then stammered, “I’m… looking for someone. Several someones, actually.”

  “How did you find us?” the woman wanted to know. She was armed with a wet wooden mixing spoon, and looked intent on using it if need be.

  “I followed, uh, a certain dwarvish gentleman.”

  “Cronion be his name. What gave you the gall to follow him?”

  “I thought he might lead me to them. To whom I’m looking for, that is.”

  “And who’s that?”

  “The Servants of the Dusk.”

  The woman scratched her head. “Never heard of them.”

  “Have you heard of Eril Eloriad, or Ryssa Ulther?”

  “Neither.”

  “Seems I’m in the wrong place after all, then. What is this place, anyway?”

  “A Temple of Adenc, used to be. Built too large and too decadent for its own good. Curators couldn’t keep it in profits. Now it’s an home. An home for lost children.”

  “May I come in?”

  “You may be lost, but you’re no child. No sir, I’m sorry to say it. You may not.”

  “Ryssa Ulther is a child. So is her sister, Vyleigh. Is there any chance you might take a look round for them?”

  “I’m under strict provisions not to admit strangelings. Especially strangelings who look like priests.”

  “I am indeed a priest,” Maaltred admitted, “if barely. I assure you my intentions are chaste. I wish only to look for the children. Then I’ll take my leave.”

  “We don’t often see visitors down here, as you’ll imagine. Yet I can’t allow you inside unless you’ve come with a writ from Cronion or one of the others.”

  “One of the other what?”

  “Proprietors.”

  “How many proprietors are there?”

  “That’s enough questions, now. Off with you.”

  Maaltred sighed. “Might you at least be so kind as to tell me how I can
get out of here?”

  “There are many ways out,” she said. “Not so many ways in, though.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Back the way you came. Left up the stairs, left round the crypt balcony and through the second door you come to.”

  “Thank you.”

  The little woman frowned as she shut the door in Maaltred’s face. He began to wish he’d possessed the stomach to barge in and scour the place despite her dismissal. Then again, he supposed it wasn’t a matter of stomach so much as one of manners, and manners were something he possessed in abundance. Perhaps it was time he threw his manners by the wayside. A home for lost children was worth another look, if only he could manage to get inside somehow. For that, he would need a little help.

  Chapter 20

  The Mages of Deepsail were crucified on thin wooden stakes, their arms pinned above their heads, their clothes torn, their bodies stripped of the rings and amulets they so often wore to enhance their powers in the mage-song. The Cove Runner drifted into the Bay of Stones on a gray morning and approached the seawall with the wind dead astern. The seas had grown choppier as they drew near the coast, yet Halbrid King’s exceptional little ship had made fine time through the worst of it.

  Darion watched his son’s face as the boy beheld the gruesome trophies atop the city walls. There was fear and revulsion in Draithon’s expression, but curiosity superseded them both.

  “How many mages are on the council?” Draithon asked, his eyes still affixed. “Or were, rather.”

  “It varies. As many as half a hundred; as few as two dozen. Lately they’ve been somewhere in between, by the look of it.”

  “Did you know them?”

  “Most of them, I trust. Impossible to tell at this distance, nor would I wish to. Yet I’ve spent time in the council chambers with some of Deepsail’s finest mages. I’ve shared roof and table with them, and found common cause for the good of the realms, despite our differences. They were good people, by and large, and theirs is a great loss to the world.”